Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#131

Post by powersnail » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion.

At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen.

Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos.

What's the point of a recommendation system if it doesn't even recommend new video of the same category I like? Might as well just shuffle my watching history.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#132

Post by krisoft » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

ss3000 wrote: post #128

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

I honestly don't understand this either... Youtube knows exactly which videos I've watched and which I haven't. Why does it think it's a good idea to ever recommend videos that I've already watched?

I had the same question!

On mobile YT suggested me to watch an old video from a channel I'm subscribed to. It's a good video but since I have watched it already (with my account logged it) and remember it who cares about it. This one time the interface asked me if it's a good suggestion! So I clicked the bad suggestion link, and then the app asked me to categorise why is it a bad suggestion. All the options were about the video itself. The categories were "overly sexualised", "gory", "boring" etc. There was no option to say "I have seen it already you silly". Way to set up a feedback system to get no useful information out of it.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#133

Post by 9HZZRfNlpR » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:19 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #131

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion. At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen. Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos. What's the point of a recommendation system if i…

Same problem with music, I thought I somehow broke their engine because it keeps feeding me some random hit songs I liked 5 years ago and does it for the past 5 years. You would think they want to show me something new for their engagement metrics but I guess not.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#134

Post by izacus » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

robotnikman wrote: post #97

thrusong wrote: post #95

YouTube recommendations suck so hard. I'm subscribed to all this stuff but it never seems to give me similar content, it recommends all the videos I've already watched. If I happen to watch something new, like a People's Court segment, then all I see is People's Court stuff. There never seems to be balance. Then there's the problem where a new video (like Gourmet Makes from BA) gets posted on a channel I like. I'll w…

I feels like YouTube's recommendations were better around 2010 to 2015. I think back then they recommended videos based on the tags a video had, seemed to work much better

I'm assuming there were less people adding fake tags to earn more views then as well.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#135

Post by khyryk » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

dghughes wrote: post #120

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

What freaks me out is how invasive YouTube/Google is. I have browser ad blockers, script blockers, privacy addons. Sure I am logged in though which pretty much defeats the purpose of all those. My often used example is the time I went car shopping with my sister. She was buying a new car I went with her (age old women vs salesman bias). The dealership was over an hour from my town, my sister lives in a different town…

I'd guess location tracking (if you have an Android phone) with you stopped at a particular place for long enough.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#136

Post by cma » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

thesuitonym wrote: post #117

I guess I just don't understand why Mozilla would spend money on this? Google is under no obligation to care about their findings. Why not spend money in areas that will actually benefit people? What do they hope to gain by this?

It could build the case internally for them to build something like peertube or support it.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#137

Post by brilee » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #131

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion. At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen. Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos. What's the point of a recommendation system if i…

It's because a large segment of classical music watchers are using it as a background music playlist, and listen to the same recordings repeatedly.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#138

Post by kenhwang » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

powersnail wrote: post #131

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is just dumb, in my opinion. At least half of the time on Youtube, I watch classical music, and you would think Youtube would recommend me some classical performances that I haven't yet seen. Nope. It keeps feeding me exactly the same videos I've already watched, despite being basically the largest catalogue of classical music videos. What's the point of a recommendation system if i…

Every Google product I've used has had hilariously awful recommendations.

For a company that has so much of my data and indexes the entire internet, it sure is surprising how bad they are at recommendations.

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#139

Post by pseudo0 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 10:02 PM UTC

FiReaNG3L wrote: post #5

What's impressive to me is that YouTube Recommendation are so ... stale. All it recommends to me is content from the same 3 categories, and the same videos over and over and over (you would think if I didn't click on the suggestion in the past 6 months it would adjust). Now the topics it recommends to me are non-political, but I can very well see that if you fall down one of more extremist rabbit holes thats all you…

Some of this blandness may be by design, at least when it comes to political content. YouTube caught a lot of flak in 2018 for allegedly being a "radicalization pipeline", but research[0] shows that their "next video" recommendations consistently direct users away from fringe content and towards mainstream media outlets. One of the authors of that paper made a website to visualize their results[1], which is pretty neat.

The research in question was limited by not using logged-in accounts with a significant view history, but it's still the best attempt to quantify the YouTube algorithm's influence that I've seen so far. Mozilla's initiative sounds interesting, but the fact that they're asking users to only report negative interactions rather than getting a representative snapshot of all YouTube use makes me suspect that Mozilla is approaching this from the perspective of advocacy, not scientific inquiry.

--- [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf [1] https://recfluence.net/

Re: Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations

#140

Post by enturn » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 10:09 PM UTC

I previously used my partner's Google account to watch on YouTube and it had built up recommendations based on what I previously watched since I didn't use the subscriptions, but one day it all just disappeared and only showed recommendations from my partner's subscriptions. I'd prefer if they implemented a user driven exploration system rather than attempting to guess what I want but it must be useful to be able to change how it works without modifying the user interface. I eventually gave up and used my own account with now 32 subscriptions and it's better than it was although it shows a lot of videos I've already watched. It throws in a few videos from other channels but it's mostly from the subscriptions.